Politics & Power Quote by Ferdinand Mount

There is a sly little trapdoor in Mount's phrasing: he isn’t defending any one war so much as indicting the public choreography around war. The line hinges on a tight irony - the same instinct that branded Iraq as reckless pre-emption can, with a change of venue and a fresh news cycle, rebrand caution in Afghanistan as weakness. Mount’s intent is to expose that reversal as less moral clarity than political weather.

The mechanics are simple and sharp. By repeating “denounced” and “passionately denounced,” he draws attention to condemnation as a performative habit, not a reasoned judgment. The double use of “pre-emptive action” matters, too: it’s a bureaucratic euphemism that sanitizes what’s really being argued about (invasion, escalation, body counts), letting critics sound principled without naming costs. “Damned if he does and damned if he doesn't” lands as the oldest cliché in the book - and that’s the point. Mount is saying the script is predictable because the incentives are: opposition is rewarded for purity, leaders are punished for ambiguity, and consistency is optional when the target is power.

Contextually, it sits in the post-Iraq hangover, when credibility had been burned but the appetite for decisive gestures hadn’t disappeared. Afghanistan, initially framed as the “good war,” became the stage where everyone tried to redeem or weaponize Iraq’s lessons. Mount’s subtext: the argument isn’t only about strategy; it’s about how democracies metabolize fear, regret, and the need to look tough after a mistake.